


two steps stumbling

by Tiss



Series: It Takes a City [4]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Allusions to Depressive Symptoms, Chronic Pain, Gen, Gladio and his Crownsguard, I think?, M/M, Noctis and his messed-up knee, Older Gladiolus Amicitia, Older Noctis Lucis Caelum, Pre-Slash, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, cringy romance tropes, entirely too much exposition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:08:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28029807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiss/pseuds/Tiss
Summary: A king versus limited mobility, and a guardscaptain versus his own troops.Or rather, a guardscaptain versus a king’s limited mobility, and the implications thereof.
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Series: It Takes a City [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1788979
Comments: 16
Kudos: 48





	two steps stumbling

**Author's Note:**

> This is slow-going, in more ways than one.
> 
> Again, thank you Nightflower_Panda for acting as my guinea pig <3

Court hours used to be something of a vestigial event, back before everything. A tradition from the olden days, brought through the ages for some reason that Gladio had never been able to fully grasp. The monarch is the symbol of the law, it says in the constitution of Lucis – the highest one could go in the judiciary chain. Of course, all that the king himself would do was sign off on his legal office’s decision, but it was the gesture that mattered.

Noct, when the petitions and complaints and pleas started coming in, still had no proper legal office.

It was a little silly, all things considered, but also a little inevitable. After the first wave of returning refugees came in and swamped Insomnia first with bodies that needed to be fed, clothed, and housed, and then with workforce that demanded employment, the city finally began to create jobs for itself. Somebody opened a bakery, somebody mended clothes, somebody ran a newspaper on Six only knew what resources.

It’s not like nobody had expected problems to crop up. There was just – a lot of other, more important stuff to deal with, and only so many hours in a day. Noct’s last meetings always ran ridiculously late, so much so that Gladio had to prod him awake in the elevator. If some stuff got left over for the next meeting, and then the next, and the next, well.

The fact of the matter was, there was no public courtroom, the pile in Noct’s offices was growing tall, and while Gladio’s Crownsguard could handle most public disturbances – sort of – they couldn’t provide a lasting solution.

And then Ignis suggested they make a show out of it.

“It will make the people feel special,” he said. “It would endear you to the public if you show that you’re not that far above them that you wouldn’t consider their plights,” he said. “Transparency is good for publicity,” he said.

They had to push forward the restoration of the throne room that Noctis had been pushing back in favor of housing and reliable energy and long-distance communication. Bizarrely enough, he'd wanted to keep the gaping hole in the wall - not untouched, exactly, but preserved as a reminder that this is a different time and that the Insomnia of old is never coming back the same - a decision that Ignis had protested for weeks, citing population moods and political climate. In the end, the gap got covered up by some fancy, custom-order stained glass, and Ignis sighed and let it go.

And now, two days a week, two hours a day, Noctis and his kingly butt are bound to the throne of Lucis physically as well as metaphorically, taking complaints and settling disputes under the watchful eye of Insomnia’s sole journalist.

Most of the stuff Noctis mediates in these court sessions are cases that he can deal with efficiently, yet fairly; complicated enough to require testimony, but simple enough to manage without an experienced judge. There’s someone in a lawyer-type administrative position now at the Citadel who moderates the cases for him, and the guy and Noct work together to put on a bit of a show.

For how classically post-apocalyptic the current state of civilization is, Gladio feels that the whole set-up is appropriately archaic.

He feels so from his spot off to the side of the platform below the throne, watchful but mostly bored. Well, bored is a strong word. He'd perfected the art of being still and paying attention to everything at once back when he was a teenager and a Crownsguard cadet. It’s not that he expects trouble, but there are ten other trained Crownsguard in the whole city, most of them former hunters, all of them still badly versed in discipline and procedure and subduing human beings without accidentally maiming them. They are his personal headache - self-imposed, sure, because he isn’t about to start shirking his duty, but a headache nonetheless.

None of the former Crownsguard or Kingsglaive have turned up to claim their spots back. He hadn’t been hoping for much, but the nothing he got is disheartening on one hand, and a massive pain in the neck on the other.

"I don't know what's worse," Gladio had complained to Ignis one night over drinks, "when they radio me in the middle of the night because they don't know what to do with a rowdy drunk, or when I come into the office in the morning and it turns out the drunk got tasered and locked up for picking a fight with the guys,  _ and _ he's a lead engineer for one of the burning building projects. Both of those have happened, by the way."

Ignis had given him the most unimpressed look he could muster from behind those sunglasses of his and told Gladio that he'd signed up for it all on his own.

Which.

Not exactly fair, since technically he’d been born into it, but Ignis was right.

Gladio isn’t about to turn over Noct’s safety to someone else. If keeping the rest of the place in order comes as a troublesome second part in this twofer, he’ll just have to deal with it.

Two of his guys are at the doors right now, opening and closing them as people go through and watching for suspicious behavior in the meantime. It’s one of the most hated duties to be assigned among the current Crownsguard. Naturally, Gladio has capitalized on it.

He has gradually, over the last couple years, turned into a drill sergeant.

It’s kind of fun. In a sadistic sort of way.

He wishes, vehemently, that Cor wasn’t still in the wind with the Kingsglaive, tying up his “loose ends” or whatever. Gladio’s father had taught him more about discipline and duty than running an actual military outfit, let alone rebuilding one, and there isn’t a day that Gladio doesn’t feel out of his depth: for all that he’d spent years shadowing Clarus while the man saw to his duties, he’d never had a proper chance to learn military management from him. It probably wouldn’t have been very applicable now anyway, given that he’s reconstructing the Guard from the ground up.

Blaming his dad won’t get him anywhere, but he’s never learned how to deal with feeling incompetent.

Court is a monotonous affair, overall. People are too intimidated to make a scene in front of the king, and for the most part, Gladio tunes them out. Aside from the plaintiff and the defendant, there are a couple advisors from the general-purpose legal team, a secretary, Noct’s personal assistant, and a journalist hanging out in the back near the doors. Out of them, only the journalist and the participants haven’t been vetted six ways to Sunday, but even they have been properly checked for weapons and the like before being allowed inside. Gladio’s presence is largely ceremonial, the sword at his hip just another part of the show.

The hand he keeps on the hilt isn’t.

Gladio is  _ not  _ compromising on Noctis’ safety. It’s the one thing he won’t allow himself to cut corners on. The one job he can’t afford to mess up.

Not after the Dawn.

He’d believed, up until the very last, that the only thing he’d find in this throne room would be a cold body.

He won’t admit to anyone, least of all to himself, just how much he’d hated himself.

If Noct dies now, Gladio might break.

By the time the “court” ends, Gladio’s lost some feeling in his feet. He’s starting to understand why so many older officers preferred desk duty to these kinds of assignments. The last petitioner leaves, the doors close, and before Gladio can finish working the stiffness out of his own shoulders, Noctis is already moving to get off the throne. Gladio allows himself a fond half-grin. He’s not the only one eager to get out of this room, it looks like.

Only, when Noct goes to get up, he doesn’t quite make it upright.

Instead, he’s only halfway there when he slams his hand on the armrest and freezes, weight caught mid-movement on that arm; the slap of his palm on the stone echoes.

Gladio is up the steps in three huge strides.

He steadies Noct with a hand on his arm and takes in the pinched mouth and eyebrows, the tension in Noct’s body from trying to hold itself as still as humanly possible. Noct even lets Gladio take some of his weight for a minute.

“How bad is it?” Gladio asks, low.

Noct doesn’t reply with words, but makes a complicated face that Gladio translates to, ‘ _ I’m too stubborn to admit that it’s a bother.’ _

Today’s an okay day, then.

He has a sliding scale of good and bad days, this post-Dawn Noct. The good days have him moving less like a zombie and more like an actual living being, talking more openly, sometimes even joking. They’re sporadic flashes of lucidity in the constant murk of not-quite-awake that seems to engulf Noct at any given point in time. On the good days, he seems to remember that he has people he can rely on.

On the bad days, nothing Gladio tries will make a difference, but he stays by Noctis’ side anyway. He’ll park himself in Noct’s parlor and have paperwork brought to him with the guards’ shift change and will only pop down to the office when he absolutely must. Sometimes, Noctis will stumble out of the bedroom, dazed, like he’s sleepwalking, and Gladio will tease him a bit because he has  _ no idea  _ what else to do and ask if Noctis wants his own work brought in.

He can’t leave Noctis alone on those days, because it feels like if he does, Noctis will disappear into thin air like a phantom and Gladio will never see him again.

He  _ can’t. _

Noctis slowly straightens, and just as slowly, Gladio lets go.

“Leg or back?” he asks.

Noct stares at him dully for a moment before replying, quiet, “Leg.”

“You wearing your brace?” he asks, voice still low, referring to the knee sleeve that Noct is supposed to put on when his leg isn’t feeling right. He’s made damn sure the king has one, too.

The way Noct looks away makes the answer obvious.

“It was fine in the morning,” he mutters.

Gladio holds in a sigh.

He’s past getting on Noct’s case for – a lot of things.

Something had changed in him, in the long years of waiting without much hope. Maybe it’s just one of those “you don’t know how much you treasure something until you lose it” things, Gladio can’t really tell, but there was a point where he’d sat down and thought,  _ ‘Noct, I swear I won’t say a harsh word to you ever again if you just come back,’  _ like it was going to make a difference.

What did any of his frustrations matter when Noct was just – gone?

And then Noct came back, and everything was so much worse.

The ‘something that had changed’ in Gladio flat-out broke.

He’d hurt so much for Noct, in that brief time between their last camp and their parting on the Citadel’s steps.  _ ‘He is going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it,’  _ was the most prominent thought in his head, chasing its tail in endless circles, round and round and round until he felt sick.  _ ‘I’d do anything so he doesn’t have to,’ _ he’d thought, but what  _ could  _ he do?

The feeling he used to get that drove him between Noct and a strike to his blind side, that – he’d never thought too hard about what it was, really, protectiveness or duty or self-sacrifice or whatever the fuck else. It had grown, in that time. And spread, everywhere, like brown on apples. Turned overripe-sweet, too.

So now, it’s just – everywhere. In every other thought he has.

Gladio feels like a huge hypocrite for ever ragging on Ignis for his ‘coddling’.

It’s a little ridiculous, how soft he now goes on Noct. Any hitch in his step, any suspicious change in his breathing, Gladio’s paying attention to that. When Noct’s knee or back act up, Gladio’s the one to massage the hurt away, and yeah, he doesn’t see anyone else lining up to do it, but he  _ wants  _ to do it anyway. Fuck, Gladio covers Noct with a blanket when the man conks out at his office desk, because damn if those dark circles under Noct’s eyes don’t make something unpleasant squirm in his heart.

To be fair, Noct doesn’t exactly make up bullshit excuses to get out of work either. Not as much, at least. Gladio lets him get away with sneaking naps in because, well, see above.

If he can do anything to make life a little easier for Noct, he’ll do it.

This is probably the first time in his life that he’s truly understood what it feels like to treasure something and have it at the same time.

After a long minute, Noct lets go of his arm and stands on his own. Gladio hovers, trying to look like he isn’t hovering, and Noct’s gait, when he moves, is slightly awkward, if determined.

They bumble through the Citadel like this, with Noct trying his damnedest not to show any pain and stumbling every so often, and Gladio walking close enough behind him to be in catching distance. The few Crownsguard and Citadel workers that they encounter on the way to Noct’s office give them curious-concerned glances, but, thankfully, they know not to stare.

Six know Noct wouldn’t be happy if they did.

By the time they make it to the waiting room in front of his office, Noct’s limping, and his secretary shoots straight up from his chair in alarm. Gladio waves him off. It’s really not often that Noct lets his leg get this bad, but it’s also not the first time. They got through it before; they’ll get through it again.

Noct never uses his father’s enormous old office, and Gladio’s never been gladder for it: it means Noct doesn’t have to cover nearly as much ground before he can sit down. He lets himself lean on Gladio’s arm, too, now that he’s afforded some privacy, and Gladio’s stuck between relieved that he does and irked that he didn’t do so earlier.

With Noct settled into his chair, Gladio can poke his head into the waiting room.

“Hey, Valeris, sorry, you busy? Could you watch over this guy and make sure he doesn’t get up and keeps his leg elevated?”

Noct’s secretary, a guy somewhat older than Noct himself, responds with a long-suffering grimace and a badly suppressed sardonic grin first, and then with, “Of course, Captain.”

…

Throughout the rest of the day, Gladio keeps wishing that his troops took their of-course-captains at least half as seriously as Valeris did. One guard’s late for a shift change by an hour, another splits his face trying to show off a weapon trick, and a few off-duty idiots first distract the guys on duty at the main entrance and then decide to try sledding down the big staircase on the shields they’d pilfered from an unused storage room. He gives those two extra cleaning duty for the next four weeks.

Gladio feels a lot like a daycare teacher, sometimes.

“Cinna, stop spinning your gun like that if you don’t wanna shoot your dick off!”

The nobility, and by extension most of the Crownsguard, used to have a huge thing about guns being a coward’s weapon. The Long Night had stripped Gladio of those hang-ups pretty well.

Good, working handguns are still somewhat rare, and ammo is even more so – they’ve got some stored in the old Citadel armory, but no reliable way to restock when they run out. Because of this, Gladio can’t afford to do gun training with his kids too often. He tries to make it count when he can.

Prompto should really be the one doing this, but he’s too busy reviving Citadel computers. Gladio just has to make do.

Ain’t that a theme for the last ten-something years.

Cinna shoots him a startled, guilty look and mumbles, “Sorry, chief.”

“What was that?” Gladio demands, putting a bit of growl into it.

“Sorry, chief!” the kid yelps, high-pitched, but loud at the very least.

Gladio has no idea why these kids keep calling him ‘chief’ despite all the times he’d drilled them on ‘Yessir’ and ‘Nosir’ and all the rest of it. He’s long decided to just let it be, but he’s still puzzled.

The other two guards in shooting practice, thankfully, aren’t fooling around with weaponry, although they aren’t stellar with it either, and Gladio sets to correcting stances and giving advice. Funnily enough, guns hadn’t exactly taken off in the rest of Lucis, either, where nobility and its prejudices were barely present: the way Gladio’d had it explained to him, it was because peashooters weren’t very useful against Lucis’ overgrown fauna.

So the former hunters he’s recruited into the new Crownsguard? Not exactly proficient with guns.

Gladio’s been doing some thinking, see? It’s called threat assessment. And Noct? Far more likely to die to a human attacker than to some wildlife.

And guns are incredibly effective against human beings when used right.

There’s a little corner in Gladio’s mind that keeps warning him about appropriate response and unnecessary fatalities, but he silences it with the image of Noct’s bloodless, bloated face. He’s seen it in nightmares often enough.

After training, it’s checking on another shift change and planning for the next week, and when he looks up from it all, he notices with some surprise that the sun is setting. The worst part about picking your own workload, Gladio decides, is not having a time limit.

It’s convenient, he decides next, that all he has left to do is drop off a copy of the schedules for Ignis and Valeris.

The secretary greets Gladio calmly, but a couple small things strike him as off: the way Valeris very subtly avoids eye contact, or the way he keeps moving stacks of paper around with the kind of care usually afforded to spun glass or babies. Gladio studies him for a brief minute, but lets it go.

“He still in there?” he asks, jerking a thumb at Noct’s office door.

“Yes,” Valeris replies with a hint of a sigh. “Has been all evening. I suppose you’d know, but…”

Gladio would’ve known, yes, if he could actually trust his subordinates to keep him updated.

He knocks on Noct’s door, calls out, “Hey,” and comes in without really waiting.

Noct, just as Gladio had expected, is at his desk, legs hidden behind it and ottoman standing in unburdened solitude nearby. He glances up at Gladio for a moment, and something sour flickers across his face before he looks back down at his paperwork.

“Don’t,” he grumbles.

“Don’t what? Tell you the obvious?”

Noct raises his eyes at him again, vaguely miffed, but it doesn’t last.

“Are you actually busy,” Gladio walks over to the desk, “or are you just pretending so I don’t give you shit for not elevating your leg?”

“What if I am,” Noct replies, flat.

“Then I’m gonna guess it probably hurts like hell by now and you should get yourself horizontal.”

The glare Noct levels at him is not really a glare, but it’s sullen all the same. Funny, how he lets Ignis order him around, but bristles whenever Gladio so much as tries to.

“Hey,” he calls softly and comes closer, bending down to take one-armed hold of Noct’s waist. “C’mon. Don’t put weight on it.”

“That’s not…” Noct begins to protest, but wraps an arm around Gladio’s back anyway.

The shittiest part of the deal is, Gladio can’t even say that it would’ve been fine if he _had_ kept the damn leg elevated. Old injuries can be iffy like that. Noct hasn’t had a really bad leg day in a while, but this is definitely getting there.

“It’ll be easier to straighten it when you’re standing. C’mon. Up.”

With a dubious eyebrow raised at Gladio, Noct complies, slow but steady. Gladio stays there, trying to take Noct’s weight as much as he can. It’s a balancing act: Noct’s pride on one side of the tightrope, his pain and Gladio’s insistence on the other.

It feels like an eternity before Noct can stand somewhat straight, but he gets there, eyebrows pinched and lips thin, and they begin the slow and awkward hobble to his suite. Valeris has wisely made himself scarce; the office block is mostly empty at this hour, too, and the king’s offices, thanks to a stroke of brilliance from one of the Citadel architects several decades back, have a pretty direct path to the restricted elevator – and the restricted elevator goes directly to the restricted residential floors: the ones that used to be assigned to the really important guests and the most trusted Citadel nobles. They’d moved Noct in there once they got everyone else moved out to the restored apartments in the city. It's still temporary, but the extra security lets Gladio sleep better at night, and it's not even because his own rooms are one door down.

Sometimes Gladio remembers his rooms used to be his father’s rooms, and the realization makes him stay in his office late into the night.

The elevator opens its doors silently, and Noct barely uses his bad leg as they shuffle in. The way he slumps into Gladio's side during the ride up is alarming. The elevator opens again.

They make it three steps into the hallway before Noct stops dead in his tracks and his grip on Gladio's jacket goes steel-tight - Gladio can tell from the way the fabric begins to pull, and when he glances down, Noct's face is turned away.

Gladio tends to be pretty hard on people when it comes to pain tolerance, he knows that about himself, but – but this –

“Alright, that’s it. Suck it up, Your Majesty.”

Noct looks at him, wide-eyed and startled, when he bends down and hooks his free arm under Noct’s knees, and a strange, croaking sort of sound leaves his throat once Gladio lifts him properly. He does it slowly and gently, careful of the hurting knee, but Noct still hisses a gasp.

He feels a lot lighter than Gladio had expected. Skinnier, too.

Gladio should start waking him up early to work out or something, but, strangely enough, he doesn’t really want to.

He’s gone soft, hasn’t he.

Damn.

It’s a strange feeling, holding the entirety of Noct in his arms like this, but not a bad strange. More – peculiar. It’s not the first time he’s done this, but they don’t exactly make a habit of it. It’s definitely the first time Noct’s awake for it. Maybe that’s the answer – the reason why this feels so unusual. Noct’s conscious, and aware. Aware of  _ Gladio _ , it feels like.

He needs to focus. And get Noct to a bed, or a couch, or  _ something _ .

Noct is so  _ warm _ .

To the guard standing at Noct’s suite doors – that’s Cinna, seems like, thank Six the kid didn’t get lost on the way to his post or something – he jerks his head sharply at the door, and Cinna jolts before getting with the program and swinging the door open. Noct makes another uncomfortable sound in his hold and then seems to curl into himself just a bit, and Gladio can’t tell if it’s the pain or the indignity, but he barks, “Crownsguard, about face!” at Cinna anyway, and the kid turns around so fast he almost trips over his own shoes.

Gladio silently shakes his head. Honestly. The Crownsguard of the Post-Dawn Era.

His dad would’ve cried.

He keeps his steps even and smooth to the best of his ability as he carries Noct through the hallway and into the parlor of his suite. The entire time, he’s ridiculously aware of every hitch in Noct’s breath, every slight shift of his limbs. Hell, even when Noct’s not doing anything that calls attention to it, the sheer alive humanness of his body, the tension in his muscles and tendons and the skin under his clothes, is impossible to ignore. There’s no pretending that Noct’s unconscious or a sack of potatoes. This whole thing – it’s making Gladio consider things he’s been stalwartly ignoring for a very long time.

With a well-practiced mental effort, he shoves the entire thought cluster away.

Noct’s parlor has a bunch of furniture left over from the suite’s previous inhabitants – it’s a little old, as is pretty much everything in the city except for the really important mechanisms, but sturdy and well-maintained. Gladio deposits his cargo on the couch and can’t help but watch him sink into it with a subdued sigh of relief. With his eyes closed and head dropped back, Noct looks – exquisite, he can admit that much to himself, but something about it seems off. Disturbing.

In the waning light of the sun, Noct looks little different from a corpse.

Gladio had literally  _ just  _ felt how alive he was.

Why does his mind insist on sticking with its nightmares so much?

He hits the lights on his way to the front door, and the room behind him floods with artificial light.

The door is as open as he’d left it, and he doesn’t bother closing it in order to talk to Cinna, still faithfully turned around to face the wall.

To his credit, Cinna notices him immediately, and for a long moment, they stare at each other – the kid side-eyeing him with wary curiosity and Gladio waiting for him to give in to the impulse. He doesn’t; Gladio feels a little proud.

“Cinna. Bring me some ice.”

The boy looks at him blankly for a moment, before asking, “Ice?”

“Yeah, ice. Frozen water. Usually found in the kitchen. Bring a towel, too.”

Cinna hesitates long enough for Gladio to give him the full drill sergeant face, at which point he scampers off with a hasty, “Yes, chief”.

“It’s been years,” Gladio says as he closes the door and goes to grab a pillow from an armchair, “and they’re still calling me ‘chief’, and I still don’t know why.”

The pillow gets added to the growing tower next to Noct.

“Have you tried asking?” and it doesn’t sound sarcastic, but knowing Noct, it was most certainly meant to.

“What, and lose my reputation as the scariest chief the guard’s ever had? Nah. You wanna wait for the ice?”

Noctis shakes his head.

“Then lose the pants.”

Together, they get Noct out of his expensive slacks without jostling his knee too much. It’s not routine, exactly, but there’s a bit of a pattern to it: Gladio used to help manage Noct’s knee back in the day, and he’d picked up where he left off once Noct came back. The prince could never be bothered to do his own massages properly.

“You want some shorts?” Gladio asks, but Noctis waves him off, looking a lot more tired than he did just a minute ago.

Gladio’s hands dig into the muscles of Noct’s thigh, the way Noct’s PT instructor had shown him over a decade ago. Noct’s back is a rigid curve in front of Gladio; the heel of his palm glides along the smooth, dry skin of Noct’s leg. This would have been intimate, if every press that edged too close to the knee didn’t bring obvious discomfort. Noct doesn’t hiss in pain outright, but from what Gladio can see whenever he spares a glance, his face is pinched. If Cinna takes any longer, Gladio’s putting him on door duty for a month.

As if summoned, there is a knock on the door and then Cinna’s voice reporting that he’s brought the stuff.

Then the idiot opens the door and sticks his head in.

“Did someone say you could come in?” Gladio growls, and the boy squeaks out an apology and backs out. Noct doesn’t seem bothered to be seen in his underwear, but Noct is also listing slowly into Gladio’s chest, so his judgment is deeply suspect.

“Hey, don’t pass out just yet,” Gladio tells him softly, and extricates himself to go retrieve the ice and chew out Cinna while he’s at it. He seriously needs to work some royal decorum studies into the kids’ schedules.

Cinna doesn’t look like he’s pissed himself yet, and Gladio doesn’t actually want to drive him to that point. He does, however, keep one of his sternest faces on as he takes the bucket of ice and the towels from the boy –  _ boy _ , really, he’s probably the same age Gladio was on that road trip – to scare a proper apology out of him. At least he brought plenty of ice – probably too much. Come to think of it, aren’t the kitchens closed at this time of night?

“Cinna.”

The boy snaps to attention.

“Yes, sir?”

“Where’d you get this?”

“In the Guard’s common room, sir.”

Gladio raises an eyebrow.

“The kitchens were closed, and we’d had an icemaker put near the living quarters. We pooled our own resources for it, sir. Had it brought over from Lestallum cheap because Luca knew someone…”

Gladio’s other eyebrow joins the first. Cinna only looks even more uncomfortable than he already did, shoulders inching towards his ears and eyes firmly on his feet.

“Alright, well, first off, props for resourcefulness,” says Gladio, and the boy unwinds a little, looking up from the floor. “Second, next time you guys need something for the barracks, tell me. I’m not just here to kick you around in training.”

“Um,” Cinna hesitates, “we thought about that, but it wasn’t a necessity, more like an indulgence because people wanted some ice for their bruises, and we figured the crown had better things to spend money on.”

These kids, seriously. Gladio shakes his head.

“Well, next time, figure that the crown will profit from keeping its military healthy and happy. You’re not dogs, you know,” he says, then smirks. “Whatever I might call you in drills.”

“Yes, chief,” Cinna replies, and there’s answering humor flickering in his eyes.

Brats, the lot of them.

When Gladio returns to Noct, he has slumped back into the couch and has his eyes closed. He seems to have fallen asleep. It’s gotten completely dark outside, and the overhead lights make his skin look sallow and his eyes sunken-in.

The sleeping beast in Gladio’s soul raises its hackles. He ignores it.

At the sound of his steps, Noct cracks his eyes open and makes grabby hands at the bucket. The last thing he resembles is a king. It calms something in Gladio, warms him from the inside.

“Hold your birds,” he says, and sets about making a cold compress.

Noctis the prince, and Noctis the king. It’s easiest for Gladio to imagine that Noct is still the same conflicted youth that he’d crossed half of Lucis with over a decade ago, that he’d trained and teased and supported when he could,

that he’d led almost to his death, and then left him alone to take the final step.

Noct had taken that step like the chosen king that he was.

For the longest time, Gladio had tried to convince himself that the only things he felt, when he thought about the Noctis of that night, were pride and respect. It didn’t seem to work.

Now he just ignores the whole thing as best he can.

When he sees Noct like this, out of his stiff royal attire and stiffer royal façade, he can pretend in short bursts that none of that had ever happened. But – in short bursts only.

For all that Noct’s features haven’t changed too much, his resting face isn’t really boredom anymore; it’s just blank, but with a haunted sort of emptiness behind it. When in public, he chisels it into something grave and focused, but alone with Gladio, he lets it fall right back.

Sometimes, when he sees that face, Gladio thinks that some part of Noctis didn’t really come back from wherever he’d gone that night in the throne room. That maybe Luna, who Noct had mentioned as the reason for his staying alive when he was supposed to have died, had kept something for herself, something crucial that makes a man alive beyond the pumping of his heart and the firing of synapses in his brain.

He shoves that thought aside with vehemence every time it arises, because he doesn’t want to admit, even to himself, how much it scares him.

_ How much does it change a person _ , Gladio wonders,  _ to accept your own death, of your own free will, and not flinch? _

Or should it be,  _ not be allowed to flinch? _

How much of it was free will, really? With how much rested on Noct’s willingness to fulfill his destiny, and how much they’d all pushed and prodded at him to keep doing what was necessary, to work for the greater good, was it even really a choice? Or was it something he’d been shoehorned into?

How much of Gladio’s own devotion is really his?

He slams a wall down on the thought.

He is the Shield of the King.

That’s all there is to it.

Noct turns lengthwise on the couch, and they get his knee elevated and covered with a bundle of ice. The towel’s a bit small, if thick; Gladio should’ve asked for a plastic bag too. As it is, someone has to hold the thing so it doesn’t slip off and scatter ice all over the floor. He and Noct take turns as their fingers go numb from the cold.

It’s a monotonous activity, but Gladio doesn’t let himself think. He stares out at the barely visible city skyline instead, struggling to make out the shapes of the crumbling skyscrapers. He thinks he can see the wall, but he might be wrong. Noct says nothing the entire time.

Eventually, Gladio decides it’s been long enough and removes the ice; Noctis sighs and lets his arms rest on his stomach, head falling back on the throw pillow. He looks languid and sort of liquid, like a cat. An urge strikes Gladio to run a hand up Noct’s good leg and under his wrinkled dress shirt, seek out that spot on the side of his ribs where blood runs close to the skin, where he’ll be warmest-

No.

“Feeling better?” Gladio asks. Noct gives him a slow blink and a barely-there twitch of his head up and down. Considering his position, it’s more of a back-and-forth. Gladio could almost snort.

Stripped of most of his clothes and responsibilities, relief loosening every muscle, Noctis seems defenseless, delicate, even fragile. He seems the most alive he’s been in years.

Some strange impulse, like an urge to check, to make sure that this is a living being in front of him, makes Gladio stand up and come closer, so that his hand can reach and move some strands away from Noct’s face. Noct doesn’t react much, just looks at him with half-lidded eyes, and there’s something soft in them, almost happy.

Gladio pulls his hand away.

“I’ll help you get to bed.”

Noct looks at him steadily and doesn’t say anything at all.

Gladio helps him to bed and doesn’t think about what he wants for even a second.

…

That night, Gladio dreams that he has a lover. Their body is warm and solid against his, and the dips and soft ridges of muscles and tendons mold to his hands as if they were made for his touch alone. He dreams about his hands on his lover’s thigh. They creep higher and higher, under the hem of black boxer briefs, over heated skin.

“ _ Let me take care of you, _ ” he says in the dream.

He wakes up with the beginnings of a boner and a faint sense of shame.

The shower he takes that morning is cold.

…

When Gladio sees Noct in the king’s office later that day, Noct looks at him with something familiarly soft and happy in his eyes.

It doesn’t make Gladio want anything.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> _Bonus drabble:_
> 
> “I’m not an invalid,” the king grumbles as Valeris slides the ottoman closer to his desk.
> 
> “The Shield’s orders,” Valeris defends, with a grin he can’t quite suppress. Under the cool exterior, the king is actually a giant softie and a bit of a man-child, he’s pretty sure.
> 
> “And I’m your King,” His Majesty responds.
> 
> “With all due respect, Your Majesty,” yep, hiding the grin is a lost cause, “your Shield is much scarier. Especially when your health is concerned.”
> 
> The king sighs with exasperation and looks out the window, but Valeris isn’t worried. Not over that, at least.
> 
> The Six have mercy on those who let harm come to Captain Amicitia’s beloved king.


End file.
